Spain’s Open Wounds

Decades after Franco’s regime, the country’s citizens continue to unearth the crimes of the past.

In the course of thirty-seven years, María Martín López sent more than a hundred handwritten letters to the Spanish authorities. She wrote to King Juan Carlos I, and to his successor; to half a dozen Prime Ministers; to judges of the Spanish Supreme Court; and to all the “bigwigs” she could think of. The letters, written in cursive and punctuated by misspellings, made a single request: the right to exhume her mother’s remains, which had lain in a mass grave since 1936. Her father, Mariano Martín de la Cruz, had until his last days sought to give his wife a dignified burial. “You’ll take her to the cemetery when pigs fly,” Francoist rebels told him. Invariably, Martín López signed off her letters as “the woman who is still waiting for pigs to fly.”

Martín de la Cruz, a reaper, met Faustina López in Pedro Bernardo, a town in the center-west province of Ávila. Flanked by a valley and a mountain range, Pedro Bernardo is known for its vast, picturesque views over the Tiétar River. In September of 1936, barely two months after the military coup that marked the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Francoist troops occupied the town. Martín López’s parents were not especially political, but they had wed, in 1921, in a discreet civil ceremony in France, and they upset Catholic sensibilities by refusing to remarry before the Church in Spain. On September 20th, while Martín de la Cruz hid in a town north of Pedro Bernardo, Francoist vigilantes detained his wife and two other women in the local girls’ school, shaved their heads, and paraded them naked around the town.

At the time, Martín López was six years old. The last memory she has of her mother’s abduction is of her older sister trying to prevent it and being pushed aside by a member of the Civil Guard with the stock of his rifle. A day later, the remains of two women and four men were found on a roadside a few miles away from her home, by a tributary that flows into the river. As the two sisters waited for their father’s return, in the care of an aunt, they were forced to expiate the sins of their deceased mother. For several years after, vigilantes often disciplined Martín López with a dose of six chili peppers and half a liter of castor oil, a noxious laxative. Every now and then, she found herself running from a throat-slitting gesture or a gun-wielding guard.

During those years, Martín López refused to disclose any details about her suffering, or about her mother’s murderers, many of whose children attended school with her. Only silence would guard her family from another loss, she thought. When the war came to an end, in the spring of 1939, and Francoist troops emerged victorious, the murder of Martín López’s mother was relegated to a buried chapter in history. Francisco Ferrándiz, a cultural anthropologist working with the Spanish National Research Council, has described the treatment of Franco’s victims as a “funerary apartheid,” manifest in the more than two thousand mass graves scattered across Spain.

Martín López’s story—and those of many victims of Franco’s regime—have been captured in the documentary “The Silence of Others,” which was produced by Pedro Almodóvar and shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination. The idea for the film emerged when its directors, Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, watched the scandal over thousands of children who were abducted during Franco’s dictatorship unfold. The topic resonated strongly with Carracedo and Bahar, who were first-time parents, and they moved to Madrid to work on the project. “We wanted to spark a conversation anew, because the common view is that these are trite subjects and that we need to move on,” Carracedo told me. “But so many people are suffering because they can’t forget, and they cannot be forced to forget.”

The hope to restore historical memory is, in many ways, a response to the Franco regime’s appropriation of the past. For decades after the Civil War, children were taught that the 1936 coup was justified; later on, the notion that both sides were equally to blame for the war’s atrocities gained ground. (The conflict claimed an estimated five hundred thousand lives.) Even today, historical reckoning is often seen as an undesirable subject, inciting resentment and sorrow. For the most part, Spanish governments have remained on the sidelines of these debates, although Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, who became Prime Minister last June, has pledged to redeem the memory of the vanquished. Until he does, testimonies such as those presented in “The Silence of Others” constitute a plea against inaction. The film raises “a human-rights question,” Bahar told me. “What is the reason, in a democracy with forty years of trajectory behind it, that María Martín cannot exhume her mother’s remains?”

The exhumation, in Villamayor de los Montes, of forty-five political prisoners who were executed and buried in a mass grave in 1936 by Franco’s rebels.

Photograph by Clemente Bernad / Contrasto / Redux

After Franco’s death, in 1975, Spaniards bid farewell to four decades of authoritarianism. In the transition period that followed, the country embraced the notion that only a clean slate could prevent the recurrence of conflict. The result was the 1977 Amnesty Law, which was negotiated by the regime’s most moderate factions and a handful of opposition parties, and which stipulated that no one would be brought to account for crimes committed during the Civil War or the dictatorship. In the decades after, amnesty laws became common in countries emerging from military regimes. Many of those laws would be overturned, but Spanish authorities have continued to defend their version as a pillar of democracy.

Martín López wrote her first letter to a government official around the time that the amnesty was enacted. She was living with her husband and their three teen-age children in a town a few miles away from Pedro Bernardo, on the opposite side of the Tiétar River. It seemed like the right time to request her mother’s exhumation: forty years had passed since Faustina López’s murder, and, after Franco’s death, relatives of Republican victims had dug up mass graves across the country. Before long, though, it became clear that Spanish authorities would evade responsibility for the exhumations. Martín López continued to write two or three letters a year in hopes of getting a response.

In 2004, Martín López attended a mass-grave exhumation in the nearby town of Casavieja and met Emilio Silva, a co-founder of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. Silva, an indefatigable man of fifty-three, belongs to a generation known for its fight against Spain’s so-called Pact of Forgetting; his own grandfather was killed by a Francoist death squad. A few years after they met, Silva encouraged Martín López to join the A.R.H.M., alongside thirteen other associations of victims’ families, in filing a petition before the National Court to look into the killings of a hundred and fourteen thousand people between 1936 and 1951.

In 2008, the criminal investigation—the first of its kind at the national level—was taken up by Judge Baltasar Garzón, who had gained notoriety in the late nineties for attempting to prosecute the Chilean former dictator Augusto Pinochet. Garzón now denounced his own country’s past, asserting that “impunity has been the rule in dealing with events that could qualify as crimes against humanity.” The investigation provoked a public outcry, and prosecutors argued that retroactive justice could not be applied to the crimes in question. Within a month, Garzón was forced to drop the case, and he found himself on trial years later, when two far-right associations accused him of violating the Amnesty Law. The case against Garzón, opened in 2009, was the only instance in which a top Spanish court has heard the testimonies of victims of the Civil War and the dictatorship.

Martín López, along with dozens of other petitioners, testified before Spain’s Supreme Court in the winter of 2012. Then eighty-two, she wore a black robe and tied her frizzy white hair in a loose bun. She seemed overwhelmed by the circumstances—her voice faltered, her breath was unsteady, and she often palmed her eyes. Several minutes into her testimony, she was cut short by the presiding judge and returned to her seat, wheeling her walker slowly. She had been determined to testify in court because Garzón had written an unusually empathic response to one of her letters. “We cannot look to the future, unless we do so on the basis of a known and healed past,” he wrote. “At the very least, we cannot do so with dignity. Dignity like that which you represent, and so many of us lack.”

At the time of the trial, Martín López also began to correspond with Ana Messutti, an Argentine lawyer. Messutti represented several plaintiffs who filed a lawsuit on Franco-era crimes before a criminal court in Buenos Aires. To Martín López, the Argentine lawsuit represented a last resort. The two women met at Martín López’s house to talk about her attempts to recover her mother’s remains. The closest she had come was in 1999, when the road next to the grave was being renovated, and she had joined the son of another victim in requesting an exhumation. The man’s brother sent a letter to a local judge, urging her to scuttle their petition; he had married the daughter of one of his father’s murderers, and preferred not to unearth the past. The judge abstained from initiating proceedings and the construction moved forward. Martín López got in the habit of tucking a bunch of flowers into the guardrail of the road.

María Martín López sits by the road which covers the mass grave containing her mother’s remains.

Photograph by Almudena Carracedo

Martín López had planned to meet Messutti again in the summer of 2014, but she died that July. Messutti, who mourned the news with a sense of helplessness, thinks of the Argentine lawsuit as a “large, transatlantic ship slowly making its way across the ocean.” The lawsuit now represents three hundred and twenty plaintiffs and eight different types of victims, including many who were repressed during the dictatorship. Chato Galante, a rangy man of seventy, was imprisoned in his twenties for opposing Franco’s regime. He spent six years in jail and was routinely tortured by a policeman known as Billy the Kid, who now lives peacefully in Madrid. “We’ve been told that we shouldn’t reopen old wounds,” Galante told me. “But do you think someone has bothered to ask if they’ve actually closed?”

An Argentine judge, invoking the same principle of universal jurisdiction that Garzón used against Pinochet, has issued several arrest warrants, which Spanish courts have refused to act upon. But Messutti remains hopeful. She believes that the lawsuit is raising awareness of Francoist crimes outside of Spain, and, above all, offering victims an alternative avenue for justice. When Martín López died, her daughter, María Ángeles Martín, went back to a white, crocheted bag that held certified mail receipts of her mother’s letters and hand-drawn maps to the grave. She transcribed a sample of letters and took them to the Argentine consulate in Madrid. “There are victims on both sides, and sorrow on both sides, too,” she told me. “But those on the winning side of the war were able to take the remains of their people home, while the others weren’t even allowed to pick them up. I’m not asking for anything the other side didn’t receive.”

On the third floor of a mustard-colored house, barely a thousand feet from the Bernabéu stadium, in Madrid, lies the headquarters of the National Francisco Franco Foundation. Nothing on the outside of the complex suggests a Francoist stronghold. On the inside, however, the dictator’s presence is ubiquitous—in gilt-framed portraits and sculpted busts; in black-and-white photographs and ornate tapestries; and in military insignia and embossed poems. Juan Chicharro, a stout man with a scruffy gray beard, took over the foundation last March. (“In the midst of the battle,” as he put it.) Since Pedro Sánchez was sworn in as Prime Minister, in June, he has insisted that there can be no place for Francoism in Spain’s democracy. He has pledged to amend the Historical Memory Law, a 2007 bill that many victims’ groups saw as insufficient; to transfer Franco’s remains from a state-funded mausoleum; and is also studying a ban of the Franco Foundation.

Over the years, critics have condemned the foundation’s glorification of Franco and its links to conservative governments. Chicharro, a former military general and assistant to King Juan Carlos I, insists that the foundation has no other mission than to defend the figure of Franco, as well as Spain’s “historical truth.” At the heart of his argument is the notion that both the victors and the vanquished have their victims. “My grandmother was a young widow, my mother was orphaned, and my father lost three brothers and a sister. But we had forgotten it—I would even say we had forgiven it!” he told me. There was a brief pause. “Well, I don’t know whether we had forgiven it. But we had certainly forgotten it.”

In September, the Spanish Parliament approved plans to exhume Franco’s remains, which lie in the Valley of the Fallen, a monument that sits an hour outside Madrid. But the government has struggled to reach an agreement with the Franco family on where the next burial site will be. Franco’s relatives have appealed Sánchez’s decision before the National Court and argued that the only other place where Franco can rest, outside of the Valley of the Fallen, is in their family crypt at Almudena Cathedral, in Madrid.

The administration is also looking into ways of redefining the mausoleum. “The Valley of the Fallen cannot be considered national patrimony, because a section of the population does not recognize it as their own,” José Guirao, the Minister of Culture, told me. Thousands of Republican prisoners constructed the monument, which was ordered by Franco in 1940 and took nineteen years to complete. The project was conceived as a monument to war victims—it houses the remains of at least thirty-three thousand people—but they are stacked into chambers, inaccessible to visitors, while the tombs of Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, are marked. This did not seem to disturb Chicharro. “What better symbol of reconciliation can there be?” he said. “The remains of people on both sides lay there, hugging, under a cross. They are intertwined.”

The monument’s appeal suggests the public’s still muddled opinions of the Franco regime. On a recent Sunday, a long line of cars waited in front of a wrought-iron fence to pay the admission fee. Past the entrance, a forested road wound through a former concentration camp to the monument, where a five-hundred-foot stone cross towered over the front esplanade. The site—one of the largest mass graves in Europe—has a discomforting air of normalcy. Hundreds of people had swarmed to celebrate Mass and gather for a drink or a pincho at the cafeteria. Lottery sellers strolled the grounds, and kids played around ranks of pines. The valley is managed by Benedictine monks, who have pledged to maintain “the cult with splendour” and who recently declared that the government would be barred from entering the monument’s grounds until it reached an agreement with Franco’s relatives.

Inside, in a basilica crowned by a dome of golden tesserae, is a large figure of Christ mounted on a juniper cross, which was handpicked by Franco. The dictator’s remains lie on the east side of the altar. Dozens of people were gathered around his tombstone; some kneeled to place a fresh bouquet of flowers, while others exchanged thoughts in murmurs. A group of teen-agers giggled; one of them raised a middle finger at the tomb and captured the gesture with his smartphone. A few minutes later, a man in his sixties asked a stranger for a picture and stood in front of the tombstone. His parents, who were from the countryside, had moved to a government-subsidized house in Madrid during the dictatorship. “His exhumation should be decided in a referendum,” the man whispered. “But only those ages fifty and above should be allowed to vote, not the eighteen-year-olds.”

Adjacent to Franco’s tombstone were two small chapels, which held a pair of unadorned brass crosses that read “Fallen for God and for Spain 1936-1939 RIP.” No other mentions of the victims could be found. An official guide, published by the office of National Patrimony, supplied little historical context on the monument, focussing instead on its aesthetics, which are “due to Francisco Franco, the Spanish Head of State from the time of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) until his death.” In front of a gift store, a representative of the office of National Patrimony explained that the number of visitors had increased significantly since June, when Sánchez announced his intention to exhume Franco’s remains. Like everyone else, she seemed unsure about the timing. “One day, we’ll come in to work, and they will have taken him,” she said.

This year, Martín López’s daughter, María Ángeles Martín, is touring Europe with Carracedo, the documentary director, to present “The Silence of Others.” Her mother’s passing became the wellspring of Martín’s activism. At fifty-four, she wears a serious, attentive expression, and she has a penchant for floral-patterned clothes. Sitting at a sun-drenched terrace in Madrid, she recalled that it was the apologetic tone of her mother’s letters that moved her to action. “They all end with, ‘I am very sorry for the inconvenience’; ‘Please forgive me if I have offended you in any way’; ‘I am not seeking revenge,’ ” she told me.

It pains her to think that her mother could have seen herself as a nuisance. At home, Martín López was often silent, a discipline that marked her childhood in Pedro Bernardo. When she began to collaborate with victims’ groups, she slowly opened up. “She felt like talking about it whenever she asked us to drive her to an exhumation ceremony, or to join her in placing fresh flowers on the site of her mother’s grave,” Martín said. “In those small moments, she would tell us her story.” Martín López passed on to her daughter the same burden that she inherited from her father. It is one that generations in Spain have handed down while government after government fails to provide closure.

Martín refuses to write any more letters. “If the royal family, if our government, and our Prime Minister are not responsible, or cannot be made responsible, where should we go?” Since joining the Argentine lawsuit, she has written one letter, addressed to Martín López on the anniversary of her death. With a shaky voice, Martín recalled the words she read at the cemetery in front of her family. “Because you wrote so many letters, I’ll address one to you today. I wish I could say that I recovered the remains, and that you are now resting side by side with my grandmother, but it is, sadly, not the case.” She went on, “We’re still here, though. Let’s see what I’ll have to say next year.”

A previous version of this article misstated the number of children abducted under Franco.